The Moz Blog

How a Search Engine Might Identify a Link Network

Let's say you're working deep in the bowels of Google's anti-paid-links department. You smoke cigars all night, say "dammit, man!" at least 3X a day and haven't had a real meal in 3 years. Your face is mass of scars from late night brawls with crafty text link sellers - they fight dirty, so you have to fight dirtier. You've given up companionship, family, and all the things that make human beings human to fight this scourge of the online world. The tactics at your disposal include:

Watching for multiple sites that acquire the same links ina given time period

Monitoring "duplicate content" across multiple domains for the links pointed to (unless a link broker has code to scramble the order and layout of the links across sites, this will pick up a lot of shared code)

Posing as a webmaster and buying links from brokers (or getting a mole to do it)

Watching for multiple sites whose strong backlinks share a high percentage of the same sites/pages

So, what would I do if I were a text link broker?

Have individual relationships with sites, and manually add sites into the link network, varying by relevance and relationship

Avoid linking to the same sets of sites on any two pages (and preferably from any two sites)

Only sell to folks I had an existing relationship with or through reputable SEO agencies (who would have a lot of cred to lose if they shared with the search engines)

Try to place ads that would get a minimal degree of true click-through traffic - this is a big one, because if a link is relevant enough to draw traffic (even a 0.2-0.5% CTR), you've created a link that's unlikely to be discounted

To you grizzled vets on either side of this battle of guts and brains, good luck...

p.s. Had my stitches out yesterday evening - not a positive experience, and I'm slowed to down to 1 hand again...

Sweet,
Is it open game on self promotion?
Paid links in natural text has long been the strategy of just about every major link builder out there.
For the sake of respecting Rands blog, I'll leave our name out of this, but here are two of our competitors that have been selling links in embedded text for over a year now.
Webuildpages.com - Presell Pages
Linkworth.com - Billboard Ads

The easiest way to spot paid links (or any unnatural links) is to look for a bunch of external links in the footer. Site wide links are even more obvious.
If somebody started offering a paid link in the middle of a natural paragraph of text in a blog or article on a decent site they would make a fortune.

////Try to place ads that would get a minimal degree of true click-through traffic - this is a big one, because if a link is relevant enough to draw traffic (even a 0.2-0.5% CTR), you've created a link that's unlikely to be discounted
How would the Search Engines know about another Site's click through rate for its' links......of course if flash is added as a link or above the link it would increase the odds of the link getting attention.
But does a Webmaster * REALLY * wan't a prospect to leave that site and go somewhere else? They may NOT come back - - - even if it is a Links page - they might NOT return to visit the other links.

Being a member of Google's anti - paid - links dept sounds fun...well maybe not. Yes, it would be easy at first..we have all seen the abuses that go on.
But after a while i think we would all end up being paranoid...seeing artificial links everywhere.
Using the red ink to cancel the Google juice on every site we see..until Lo and Behold someone comes up with the idea of entrusting a computer and an algorithm to do the work.
Sounds familiar?

What worries me most about Google's stance here is the apparent lack of understanding of threat levels to search quality. Paid links? I'd say it is a low to non-existant threat. Page jacking (yes, it still works), authority/news/edu sellouts with doorway pages, Spaces/Blogspot junk, and subdomain garbage are much bigger threats.
But...G doesn't make any money off of the paid links, whereas most of the spammiest stuff is MFA, so less scrutiny is placed.

Fantastic post randfish--enjoyed the characterization!
I agree with Cygnus that links are the lessor of the evils, but we do know that Google has been growing more and more interested in paid links and link networks. Google should just start their own brokering service, take a cut, and throw a blind eye to SEO webmasters who buy in. They already have our analytics and sitemaps.